House of Hunger by Alexis Henderson

Author:Alexis Henderson [Henderson, Alexis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Lisavet spared the fox pup but went on to kill two boars, a brace of rabbits chased from their den, and a small quail that she shot midair, clean through the eye. That night, while the court gathered in the dining room for a feast of roast boar, Lisavet—drawn and weary—retired to her private quarters. She didn’t bother to say goodbye to Marion; in fact, she didn’t say anything to Marion at all. Lisavet had all but ignored her for the remainder of the hunt, and Marion knew with a bitter certainty that she’d somehow disappointed her.

Marion watched Ivor from down the feasting table, drunk and glistening with sweat, a servant girl perched on his knee, a two-pronged fork in his hand, its tongs speared clean through a greasy roast boar’s ear. He smiled at Marion, slurred something about a fox on the run, and the girl in his lap erupted into a fit of laughter.

Ivor was pompous to be certain, but he was still a human being and Marion had very nearly killed him, would have if the bullet met its mark. Her cheeks burned with shame at the thought. What manner of depravity had overcome her during the hunt? What was she thinking? What was Lisavet thinking, that she would demand that Marion sacrifice her position—and perhaps more importantly her soul—by ending the life of another?

Shaken, Marion dismissed herself from the table, cutting through the kitchen on her way to the servants’ stairs. She took them up to the third floor, found her way to Lisavet’s room, and knocked on the door with a sharp rap of the knuckles. “It’s Marion.”

“Enter.”

Marion pushed open the door and entered the parlor to find Lisavet seated at the desk in its corner—a pair of tweezers in one hand, a scalpel in the other—painstakingly disemboweling the quail she’d shot mere hours before. She worked by the flickering light of the single electric light bulb standing at the far edge of the desk. “What do you want?”

Marion nudged the door shut behind her. “Did you really want me to kill him?”

Lisavet frowned down at her work, taking care not to pierce the bird’s intestines as she removed them. “If I say yes, will you kill him tonight?”

“I . . . no, of course not—”

“Then why do you ask?”

“Because I don’t understand why you hate him so much,” she blurted. “None of you want for anything. You don’t know what it is to starve, or scrabble, or sleep on the streets. All of you have more than enough, and yet you still find the most inane reasons to loathe each other. What is there to fight over when you have everything already?”

Lisavet, exasperated, lowered her tools with a clatter, setting the tweezers on one side of the bird, the scalpel on the other. “If you must know, Ivor is the third son of the Lord of Fog,” said Lisavet. Marion remembered that House from the first day of her studies with Tutor Geoffrey.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.